BoK
December 15th, 2009, 03:28 PM
Hi clarge,
When I hear your plans, I think they sound great. What I would do myself would be to have the email input field already on the first page, just inside the blue area in which you offer the free trial version. So when they submit their email address, they will then jump to a "have received your request for a trial" page, where you tell the visitor that he is soon going to get an email, and when he confirms the subscription, he will get the link to the free trial download.
What I am assuming here, with 1000s of downloads, is that you do not want to manage all those emails by hand. So you need an autoresponder, like AWeber or GetResponse or something like that. These, can, of course be tricky to set up, but once up and running they are immensely helpful. I am assuming also that you have understood the value of having a list which you may continuously sell to. Perhaps you want to plan for two email lists, so that you can switch them over once they buy your product.
Since you have a WordPress blog, it should be easy, if you just have standard widgets, to use a plain text widget to paste in the html or javascript code that you get from your favourite autoresponder. The tricky part is just to produce that piece of code in the first place, so that it integrates perfectly with your blog and works flawlessly with all major browsers (on pc: internet explorer 6 and up, firefox, opera, safari, and chrome; on mac: firefox, safari, opera)
Just to give an example: I am using on my own WordPress blog a piece of code that took me several days to develop. AWeber has recently upgraded to a new "fancy" layout editor for forms, which is not ideal. In any case, when I was finished with the form and tested it, I found that it (both the javascript version and the html version) worked on all browsers that I mentioned above, except for one of the explorer versions. So I had to develop my own code to make it look nice under all circumstances. (But maybe GetResponse's layout system for their forms is better?)
In any case, feel free to take a look at what I did (I have signup forms both on the home page, and on every post page (at the end of each post). Note that I am interested in testing, so my two forms, although virtually identical in how I integrate them, have separate names, so that I can easily see from which form they signed up. That way I can get to know the "sales" value and "conversion rate" of each form.
Take care!
Bo
http://www.ebookbrothers.com
When I hear your plans, I think they sound great. What I would do myself would be to have the email input field already on the first page, just inside the blue area in which you offer the free trial version. So when they submit their email address, they will then jump to a "have received your request for a trial" page, where you tell the visitor that he is soon going to get an email, and when he confirms the subscription, he will get the link to the free trial download.
What I am assuming here, with 1000s of downloads, is that you do not want to manage all those emails by hand. So you need an autoresponder, like AWeber or GetResponse or something like that. These, can, of course be tricky to set up, but once up and running they are immensely helpful. I am assuming also that you have understood the value of having a list which you may continuously sell to. Perhaps you want to plan for two email lists, so that you can switch them over once they buy your product.
Since you have a WordPress blog, it should be easy, if you just have standard widgets, to use a plain text widget to paste in the html or javascript code that you get from your favourite autoresponder. The tricky part is just to produce that piece of code in the first place, so that it integrates perfectly with your blog and works flawlessly with all major browsers (on pc: internet explorer 6 and up, firefox, opera, safari, and chrome; on mac: firefox, safari, opera)
Just to give an example: I am using on my own WordPress blog a piece of code that took me several days to develop. AWeber has recently upgraded to a new "fancy" layout editor for forms, which is not ideal. In any case, when I was finished with the form and tested it, I found that it (both the javascript version and the html version) worked on all browsers that I mentioned above, except for one of the explorer versions. So I had to develop my own code to make it look nice under all circumstances. (But maybe GetResponse's layout system for their forms is better?)
In any case, feel free to take a look at what I did (I have signup forms both on the home page, and on every post page (at the end of each post). Note that I am interested in testing, so my two forms, although virtually identical in how I integrate them, have separate names, so that I can easily see from which form they signed up. That way I can get to know the "sales" value and "conversion rate" of each form.
Take care!
Bo
http://www.ebookbrothers.com